Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Staunton, August 2 – Russians do not
by their nature “love Stalin,” Novaya
gazeta commentator Aleksandr Rubtsov says; instead, they “are being taught
to love Stalin because the [Putin] regime really is functioning according to
this regime prototype and has not found any other legitimation for itself in
history.”

This becomes obvious, he says, if
one considers that “genetically and functionally, the Russia of the 2000s arose
out of the 1990s” and that Putin and his team “assert that everything good that
they began in [the first decade of this century] is in no way obliged to
Yeltsinism” (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2017/08/02/73312-stalinizm-bez-stalina).

As a result, the Putin regime has
had to look past “the pit of the 1990s” to a more distant past, but the
question has been to just which past.“As
far as ‘cadres’ are concerned, all the persons of the post-Stalin era –
Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Andropov, Brezhnev and Khrushchev have been stricken from
the record.”

“Stalin is the first with whom Putin
meets in this retrospective toward the past.And the past: before him is again a fiasco. Lenin and the great tsars,
the victors and the reforms fall away. Somewhere in the shadow of the
mustaschioed one looms Ivan the Terrible but only as ‘the Stalin of his day.’” As a result of this subtraction, Putin is left
alone with Stalin.

There are, of course, important
distinctions between the two: Today, “there are no mass purges and bloody
rotations, not to mention incidents of sadism … the purge of the political
field [under Putin] has become incomparably more humane.”There are “show trials” but they don’t end in
shooting or torture.

Moreover, Rubtsov says, “the
techniques of neutralization of hostile classes have been significantly
softened.” Small and mid-sized business “like the middle class as a whole” is
gradually squeezed but it isn’t suppressed. And the peasantry isn’t facing
wholesale expropriation and dekulakization.

The methods of “’soft terror’” are
employed, but to the same ends: the isolation and ultimate nullification of
those the regime objects to.And this
process now is much more severe than it was during Brezhnevite stagnation,
Rubtsov argues.Indeed, one can only
call it “Stalinist.”

“History is like a pendulum,” the
commentator continues. “Under Stalin, the class struggle sharped; the enemy was
everywhere. In the period of ‘stagnation,’ on the contrary, the internal enemy
became ‘ideologically non-existent,’ and prison was replaced by punitive
psychiatry with the deportation” of the especially recalcitrant.

Now under Putin, “the domestic enemy
is growing more active with each new victory of ours in the world. Therefore, a
new political geography has been established. The state border has been imposed
within the country: the opponents of the regime are ‘deported’ politically and
broadcast as it were from beyond that border.”

Putin moreover is “re-Stalinizing branch
by branch.” The regime is increasingly hostile to science, art and culture. “The
authorities have always viewed scholars as suspicious ‘specialists,’ but now
they threaten the scientific community as a class. The professions are being
neutralized and people will say: Putin
received a Russia with a hydrogen bomb and left it without an academy and
without science. [stress added] The same is true for artists and cultural
figures.

Putin’s siloviki “also are reviving
traditional values” not in pursuit of blood as under Stalin but for money.Reversing the events of two decades ago but recalling
Stalin’s destruction of NEP, they are dragging back into the state sector all
that was productive when it was in the private o

There has been a similar return to
Stalinism as far as the relationship between domestic and foreign policy is
concerned, Rubtsov says. “In personalist regimes, foreign policy is subordinate
to the main goal of the consolidation and strengthening of personal power.”
Anything that doesn’t do that is quickly jettisoned.

The big difference here, the
commentator continues, is that “now the status of power and the meaning of ‘influence’
are much closer to ritual symbolism and the simulacra of propaganda” than to
actual events and real power.

And this pattern highlights
something else, Rubtsov argues. If one examines the situation case by case,
Russia under Putin is closer to Brezhnevite stagnation than to Stalinism; but
if one considers the direction in which things are moving, then “the vector is
closer to Stalinism” than to that of Leonid Brezhnev.

But this is “not the most evil
irony: the lightened version of Stalinism in a number of regards is turning out
to be freer and softer even than in comparison with the era of the 20th
Congress. At least so far.” But if things continue in the direction the Kremlin
leader has indicated, that will not long remain the case.

“Putin needs a dictatorship to
prepare for war with America just as Stalin did for the preparation of war with
Germany.” The model must be repeated step by step in its latest incarnation.
That requires moral re-Stalinization and making the original model more
attractive in the eyes of the population.